Description

Poetry. THE GREEN RECORD, by Carlos Lara, is a project of "metavocal English," "allowing common words to mutate, hybridize, disintegrate...to fill up each page entirely with audiographic data via intentional mishearing." Recalling Lautreamont's famous "chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella," this book-length poem enlivens the Surreal tradition for our self-absorbed, apprehensive moment. Lara reads our everyday reality as a relentless sequence of misprision which at times, in our most adaptive naïveté, we accept as self-affirmation: "a plain begging for more tomorrows and tomorrow's skin for the sake of more skin." Or, in other moments, the concealment, erosion or even disappearance of what is known or can be known is irrevocable and complete: "I didn't think about the office or god for a month / which was actually a cradle or maybe a Manchurian mirror / it was all whalebone electronic / the stars' manifesto."

"Carlos Lara's THE GREEN RECORD is none other than a spontaneous casting of dice across borderless imaginal terrain. It is language akin to alchemic transcription, transmuting aural tin to a state not unlike psychic translucence. His images swirl as mesmerizing thickets always advancing beyond themselves, having the effect of emboldened respiration, creating in the reader an expanded state of neurological irradiation."—Will Alexander

Reviews

Author Bio

Carlos Lara is the co-author, with Will Alexander, of The Audiographic As Data (Oyster Moon, 2016). Excerpts from THE GREEN RECORD have appeared previously in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Chronopolis, NOÖ Weekly, and Entropy Magazine. A prelude to the book, The Green Record: New Material, was published as a chapbook by Apostrophe Books in 2017. Other poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Flag + Void, and OmniVerse. He abides in Los Angeles with his wife and two cats.